Mammon and the New Media in Indonesia

In Talking PointsUnspun’s alter ego makes the observation that Indonesian has entered into an interesting phase where marketers have suddenly woken up to the potential of New Media. They are enlisting the help of Digital Influencers but are they all going about it in a way that would benefit the brands, their customers and, most of all, the Digital Influencers themselves?

I checked my Facebook account today and found that I had some invites from several prominent online presences (read: Twitterers and bloggers who are quite well known and therefore potentially influential).

Many of them are good friends or at least acquaintances with established Net identities/personas. So it was a bit surprising to see what they were inviting me to join. The invites were actually for products or brands that were irrelevant to what they themselves usually blogged or Twitted about.

It was as if I woke up to read in the papers that a sports editor in an influential newspaper had written a review on the Cobra Starship concert for the newspaper’s music column.

Something wasn’t right.

The reasonable inference from this spate of invites is that the Indonesian marketing communications community has come to the conclusion that new media–Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other social network platforms–matters. And that they need to get in there to secure their share of voice.